In an organization such as a company, a university, a government agency or a research institution, various experts are performing work activities using a same network. When launching a new project, for example, in the organization, it is desirable to be able to efficiently gather experts having expertise that may be necessary to carry out the project from among the experts distributed within the organization.
Accordingly, in recent years, technologies have been disclosed which enable an easy search to be made for experts via a network. Patent Document 1, for example, discloses a technology that, when receiving a search request specifying a search keyword from a user terminal, retrieves a document including the search keyword within the document from a document storage apparatus. According to the technology, the importance score of the search keyword within the retrieved document is determined. Then, the expert degree score of a registrant of the retrieved document is calculated on the basis of the registrant of the retrieved document and the importance score. Registered users can be ranked on the basis of expert degree scores by the above-described method. Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2008-234550, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2006-268080, and Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2011-103059, for example, are disclosed as related art.
According to the method disclosed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2008-234550, a person who has registered a larger number of documents including a search keyword is determined to have a higher level of expertise. Further, even a person who is not engaged in work related to the search keyword now is determined to be a person having a high level of expertise depending on the number of documents including the search keyword which documents were registered in the past. In view of these problems, it is desirable to be able to further improve the accuracy of searching for experts on the basis of a search keyword.